Aug20
Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) are designed to be fast and easy to implement, and don’t require any coding, at least for basic features. The Custom Search Engine user interface deliberately keeps things simple, as does the accompanying documentation. It doesn’t take long, though, for the first-time CSE builder to want to exercise finer control over their search engine, and to begin pushing up against the boundaries of the simple CSE control panel. That’s the topic we explore in this post.
This article is not intended as a gentle introduction to CSEs. For that, you may want to start with this overview of Google Custom Search Engines or this article showing how to build a good Custom Search Engine.
Let’s look at an example of customization. With CSEs, it’s easy to say “build me a search engine that searches the entire web, but gives these hand-picked resources (pages, groups of pages, or entire sites – you choose) a ’boost’ in the rankings, so that they tend to show up high on the results page.” In fact, this may be one of the most common use cases, and it’s supported naturally in the basic CSE user interface.
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\\ tags: CSE, Custom Search Engines, google, Search Engines
Aug20
Labeling the World Wide Web
A surprisingly little-known fact is that Google, and some trusted partners, have quietly annotated a large number of web sites with standard labels. The fruits of this labor are quite visible in Google if you search on medical terms like “prostate cancer” or “bird flu”.
The results that you see, with the “refinement interface” prominently displayed above the list of search results, is another aspect of Google Topics, the platform that underlies Google Custom Search Engines. The same refinement UI you see here is available to authors of CSEs.
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\\ tags: google, search engine, tips, Tricks
Aug20
One of the key factors that will determine the long term success of Google’s Custom Search Engine announcement is whether or not users will find value in Custom Search Engines (CSEs). Put differently, will CSEs differ enough from Google’s core search results to be worth the trouble? Users are not going to use these things unless they improve their lives somehow, in some manner that they care about.
We do know that users care about searching. When a user begins a search, they want to find something. Since their real work begins when they are done searching, they want the search to be done fast, perhaps even instantly. We have all experienced it – where we do an initial search, find that the results are not what we want, we refine our search, and try it over again. Fundamentally, this whole process is a waste of our time until we get the result we want.
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\\ tags: google, search engine
Aug20
Overview
Google’s new Custom Search Engine (Google CSE) program enables web site owners to define their own search engines. CSE provides a deceptively simple form-based interface for building a domain-specific search engine on top of the Google search platform. This means that the builder gets to focus on selecting valuable content and tuning the ranking criteria, while Google does all the “heavy lifting” of crawling, indexing, ranking, and displaying results.
The main task of building a CSE is to determine which sites/URLs (including flexible URL patterns) are searched, and to define a set of rules that guide the ranking of results. Specifically, the CSE program allows four major methods for altering the search results:
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\\ tags: google, Search Engines
Jun03
Whether it ends up being akin to Custer’s last stand or not, Microsoft has just announced Bing, as it desperately tries to find a way to take market share away from Google.
Whether you love the new name or not–personally, I think it’s a huge improvement on Windows Live Search–you owe it to yourself to go and try Microsoft’s revamped search offering when it launches on June 3. And by “try” I don’t mean enter one search query and make up your mind, I mean give it a solid week or two. You might just find that Bing pleasantly surprises.
At least, it surprised me. I’ve been playing with Bing for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been looking forward to today’s announcement. I’m not sure if Bing is good enough to break my Google habit, but there’s a lot under the hood to make me seriously consider switching from the all powerful, all knowing, Google.
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\\ tags: Bing.com, google
Mar19
Real-time microblogging and messaging services like Twitter could potentially become a threat to Google — whose search index doesn’t keep up with conversations as quickly as Twitter’s. So what does Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt think about Twitter?
“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems,” he said this afternoon at Morgan Stanley’s technology conference. (Live notes here.) What’s he talking about?
“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?
I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using.
Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly.”
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\\ tags: Google CEO, Twitter
Mar19
Wouldn’t it be great if you could ask your search engine a question in the same way you’d ask a person — and get the precise answer you wanted? You know the sort of thing: “How many rivets are there in the Golden Gate Bridge?” Try doing that with a search engine like Google and you’ll get pages and pages of possible answers to wade through. But British scientist Stephen Wolfram is planning to launch a search engine that he claims will revolutionize searching for information on the Web.
The new search engine — called Wolfram Alpha — differs from conventional search engines in that users can ask questions using natural language and the search engine uses “knowledge models” to bring you the right answer. But does it really work, and will it be a Google killer? Wolfram says “yes” to the first question and “no” to second, insisting that Google and Wolfram Alpha will co-exist and offer different forms of searching. We’ll have a better idea of how well it all works when Wolfram Alpha goes live this May.
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Mar07
Searching for torrents can be a little tricky, after all Google wasn’t made as a torrent search engine. This is where torrent search engines comes handy, which makes finding simple and easy.
We decided to compile a list of Top 5 new torrent search engines, its the beginning of September 2008 we bring you some new players in this field (except Torrentz which is 5 years old). The list includes only public websites, which allows you to search for torrents without registration or ratio requirements.
Note: These search engines do not host the torrents on their servers.
Usniff is a new real-time search engine that lets you search on 8 different torrent websites (The Pirate Bay, mininova, etc.) simultaneously. Its features include searching for torrents on 8 popular torrent sites simultaneously, filter search results by keyword, size, seeds, peers, and source. Adding Usniff torrent search in Firefox search bar makes searching more easy.
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\\ tags: Torrent
Feb08
Google Suggest, the auto-completion search tool that ’suggests’ popular search results to you while typing is very useful. That is if you would want to know more about what the universe is searching for. Here are just an example list of 30 of the funniest Google Suggest search terms I came across.
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\\ tags: google, Google Suggest
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